Tuesday, May 19, 2020

I recently wrote a blog post for our larger Holocaust Handbooks project on Ingrid Weckert's Jewish Emigration From the Third Reich. In the beginning, I pointed out that Weckert has the closest demonstrable ties to neo-Nazis among the living deniers, with Jürgen Graf a close second. Since writing that post, I had occasion to read Graf's The Giant With Feet of Clay -- his lengthy critique of the work of Raul Hilberg. I wanted to provide this brief post to make a few brief comments on the man generally and one of his sources.

First, Graf is easily the most overtly antisemitic of the Castle Hill/CODOH authors. Given how frequently he has collaborated with Carlo Mattogno -- who has comparatively much cleaner hands in this regard -- it doesn't really say much for Mattogno that he apparently regards Graf's work so highly. Should the accusation arise that this statement amounts to guilt by association -- well, yes, it does.

Second, Graf's writing of history is garbage. He doesn’t understand the basics of source analysis and seems to believe (or at least argues) that eyewitness statements are never reliable. He also shamelessly quote mines, often to suppress information that he must be aware would undermine his own theses. He just plainly doesn't know what he's doing most of the time. Mattogno's writing brings its own set of related -- but distinct -- problems. But compared to Graf's solo work, Mattogno should be shortlisted for the Pulitzer. Graf is really that bad.

We'll be elaborating on these points over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to describe my pursuit of a source that Graf cites in TGWFOC. Among the more striking claims made by Graf in this opus is buried in a footnote on page 36 of the most recent edition: "Of 531 leading personalities in the Soviet Union in 1920, 447 were Jews, cf. Juri K. Begunov, Tajnye Sily w istorii Rossij [sic],Isdatelstvo Imeni A.S. Syborina, St. Petersburg 1996."

It took a bit of work, but I did manage to find a copy of the cited book by Yurij Begunov, about whom, it should be noted, enough has been written to firmly cast him into the group of conspiracy loons. Mina Sodman reported in Searchlight (March 2002) that Begunov was among the attendees of a Holocaust denial "conference" held in Moscow in January 2002; Graf was also in attendence.

Regarding the book and its claim about 447 of 531 "leading personalities" of the USSR being Jewish in 1920 (which, it bears mention, isn't 1941 and is, therefore, after the conscious Russification of the Soviet leadership undertaken under Stalin and after the Great Purges, in which many, perhaps most, of these leaders were shot), it seems Begunov cribbed his list at least in part from Robert Wilton. Our own Sergey Romanov has already discussed Wilton's lists in some detail, so I won't belabor his points.

I'll add only that, where Begunov has added individuals, he seems to have followed Wilton's basic rules of both creating people and positions where none previously existed and assuming that any person whose name doesn't end in -sky, -vich, or -ov must be a Jew, regardless of any other evidence. To be clear, both Russia proper and the Baltic States had large, influential German-speaking populations into the early 20th century who kept their German names. The White Army General P.N. Wrangel is just one prominent example. In addition, Begunov counts several people multiple times in multiple lists, so what the true numbers are of Jews and total people listed in his book are anyone's guess.

The bottom line is that Graf is a kook's kook and relied on a real garbage heap of a "study" to make this specific allegation.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Unlike Heddesheimer, Ingrid Weckert is a known quantity. She
has a long career on Germany’s far-right; of all the HH authors, she has the
clearest connections with the neo-Nazi movement in Europe, with Jürgen Graf a
close second. Now in her 90s, she has spent the last 40 years writing
exculpations of Nazi figures (including Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels)
and crimes (most notably Kristallnacht). Beyond contributions to Holocaust
denial, she was closely affiliated with the neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen in
the 1980s and participated in attempts to form legitimate far-right political
parties --most recently, Kühnen’s
Deutsch Alternative, which was banned in 1992. Trained as a librarian, she also
studied theology and history, including allegedly studying Jewish history in
Israel.

Weckert’s contribution to the HH collection, Jewish
Emigration from the Third Reich, is a translation of her Auswanderung
der Juden aus dem Dritten Reich, which Castle Hill published in 2004. A
slim volume numbering only 70 pages not including frontmatter, backmatter, and
appendices, it attempts to strike a more seemingly conciliatory tone than much of
Weckert’s previous work. Nevertheless, it repeats the grotesque errors of that
work, with the typical lying by omission, whitewashing, and blame shifting
found there. It is important to state at the outset that a thorough checking of
Weckert’s use of source material is beyond the scope of this short review. That
said, an earlier review by Andrew E. Mathis of Weckert’s article on Kristallnacht in the Journal
of Historical Review (summer 1985 issue) found that she
was a routine abuser and misrepresenter of her cited sources.[1]

"Forensic evidence" is lacking for the vast majority of people killed during World War Two. Yet, it is not that we do not know what happened during this time: combat deaths, war deaths, bombing deaths, ethnic cleansing, genocide, pogroms etc. Historians have access to a wide range of types of sources to reconstruct the events. Holocaust deniers do not raise their hands that they have issues with this - like when it concerns German casualties. But on the extermination of the European Jews, deniers are suddenly keen to make up new standards to deny the reality of the fate of the Jews. It is a symptom of desperation that they cannot cope with the evidence on Nazi atrocities with "fair play" according to what is reasonable and accepted on other historical events.

Santiago Alvarez, too, thought to make up new rules. He claims that "finding the murder weapon and at least traces of the victim are key issues" and "a pivotal point for any independent scientific investigation" (p.17). Finding the murder weapon and the victim are not even pivotal for a criminal investigation of murder, let aside for historical research on state-sponsored mass violence during a bloody world war decades ago. As if killings - howsoever well-evidenced - could not be established if the murder weapon and corpse are not available. The only "pivotal" point is whether shortage of "material evidence" is explainable within the context.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

[Update 14.05.2020: a quick rejoinder to Denier Muppet's non-response has been added. Also added to the Buchhalter section.]

So, some silly neo-Nazi (to whom we will refer as Denier Muppet) thinks he has a gotcha - allegedly he found some prominent Holocaust survivors listed in the Yad Vashem database and the neo-Nazi muppets have been all agog about this. Let's take a quick look, but before that, what is the Yad Vashem database?

It's a database that intends to list the names of the Holocaust victims. According to the FAQ, currently it contains 6.5 million records and it is estimated that those refer to about 4.8 million individuals (i. e. YV tries to account for duplicate records).

What are the sources of the database? The FAQ explains: a huge chunk comes from the pages of testimony (basically, forms filled out by survivors or relatives about the presumed victims), archival documentation and local commemoration projects.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

If one thing becomes abundantly clear when one looks at
the list of Holocaust Handbooks published by Castle Hill and CODOH, it is that
they are overwhelmingly concerned with the Holocaust itself and, within that
topic, the part of the Holocaust occurring within the concentration camp
system. Where the handbooks are comparatively lighter is in any sense of the
history of the Third Reich or of Jews – to say nothing of the intersection of
the two in terms of Nazi Jewish policy – before the invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941. If Hilberg dedicated the first sixth of Destruction of
the European Jews to the events leading up to Barbarossa, we might perhaps
expect that seven of the 42 HH books similarly address topics from medieval and
early modern European antisemitism through the invasion and occupation of
Poland by Nazi Germany; instead, we have essentially two -- The First
Holocaust by Don Heddesheimer and Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich
by Ingrid Weckert -- or 4.8%.[1]

At the end of last month, the flagship denier ‘Holocaust Handbooks’ series welcomed a new author, the pseudonymous Ernst Böhm, into the fold. With this publication, the series reached 40 titles. The bigger news that will likely go unmentioned by his publisher Germar Rudolf is that Böhm is the first new contributor to the series since the equally pseudonymous Warren B. Rutledge, a whole five years ago. Still, reaching the milestone of 40 books is worthy of some celebration (by the deniers) and criticism (by anti-deniers), and thus we at Holocaust Controversies announce a new occasional series of reviews of the ‘Holocaust Handbooks’ series.

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Somebody requested in a Holocaust denial forum on my blog article Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go? that "the issue of these transported Jews" shall be "addressed correctly and precisely" by deniers. Brilliant idea! But also pretty naive - we are not calling that place "the cesspit" for nothing. Readily illustrated by the emoderator "Hannover" with his nervous attempt of damage control. High spam factor, little relevance and zero impact on the issue at the hand.

The deniers Graf, Mattogno and Kues? Already addressed in the same blog posting.

Jews in labour camps west of Treblinka and "Jews evacuated to USSR during war" prior Nazi occupation? Does not deal with the fate of unfit Jews "evacuated to the East" during Nazi occupation.

"1,250,000 – 1,500,000 Polish Jews homeless in Europe" (although carelessly attributed to Polish Jews in a letter by Stephen Wise, the figureactuallyrefers to all Jews outside the Soviet Union) and an "Influx of 3,000,000 JEWS" after the war? That's from the same bag of denier's trick and ignores that a figure of 3 - 4 million Jews in Europe after the war is the order of magnitude expected after the decimation of 5-6 million anyway. It does not help to explain away the Jewish losses during the war. But let's have a closer look at this one.

How many Jews had there been on the eve of the mass extermination of Jews in continental Europe (i.e., always without Great-Britain)? Let's start with how many Jews the Nazis estimated had been in Europe. This is complemented by estimations after the war as well a more recent monograph on Holocaust demographics.